SharePoint intranet vs a custom intranet or staff portal

Is SharePoint an intranet?

SharePoint is a platform for building an intranet, not an intranet you switch on. If your organisation uses Microsoft 365, you already pay for it. It gives you sites, pages, news, document libraries, lists, search and a home site that can be set as the front door for everyone.

What SharePoint doesn’t give you is a structure that makes sense to your staff, content that stays current, or permissions that match how your teams actually work. Those take people and time whichever option you choose.

There are three realistic paths:

1. Plain SharePoint, configured by your IT team or a partner.
2. A packaged intranet product built on SharePoint, sold as a subscription, which adds templates, design, governance tools and often analytics.
3. A custom intranet or staff portal, built as a web or mobile app, which may or may not use SharePoint for documents behind the scenes.

What do you get with SharePoint and the SharePoint app in Teams?

You get a home site, news, a dashboard and resources, available on the web and inside Teams on desktop and mobile. Microsoft has renamed Viva Connections as the SharePoint app in Teams. Its documentation describes four components: news, a dashboard of cards, announcements and resources, built on SharePoint home site technology.

The licence detail matters. Microsoft says users with a Microsoft 365 E, F or A licence can create and use one SharePoint app in Teams experience. Two or more experiences, up to 50, require every user in the tenant to hold a Viva Suite or Viva Communications and Communities licence. For a business that wants separate experiences for head office and frontline staff, that’s a cost decision, not a configuration one.

The frontline licence problem

Every person who signs in to a SharePoint intranet needs a Microsoft 365 licence, and that’s the single biggest issue for employers with large casual or deskless workforces.

Microsoft’s frontline plans exist for this. On Microsoft’s Australian frontline plans page, after the price rise from 1 July 2026, F1 is listed at AU$4.50 and F3 at AU$15.00 per user per month, paid yearly, excluding GST. Both include SharePoint and Teams, with web and mobile Office apps and 2 GB of OneDrive storage. F1 has read only Office apps.

Workforce	Staff	F1 per year	F3 per year
Small team	50	AU$2,700	AU$9,000
Hospitality or retail group	400	AU$21,600	AU$72,000
Large casual workforce	2,000	AU$108,000	AU$360,000

Those prices are low per person, and for many employers F1 is the right answer, because it also gives frontline staff Teams chat and calling. The calculation changes when:

• Turnover is high. Licences, accounts and access need managing for every casual who starts and leaves.
• Staff only need three things, such as their roster, payslips and the latest safety notice, and would rather sign in with a mobile number than a work account.
• Some workers aren’t employees, such as contractors, volunteers or agency staff, who you may not want inside your Microsoft tenant at all.

Plain SharePoint, packaged intranet or custom?

Plain SharePoint suits organisations with a capable IT team and mostly office staff; packaged products suit those who want a polished result faster; custom suits portals that behave more like an app than a website.

	Plain SharePoint	Packaged intranet on SharePoint	Custom intranet or portal
Licences	Microsoft 365 for every user	Microsoft 365 plus product subscription	Hosting, plus Microsoft 365 only if you use it
Time to launch	Weeks to months	Weeks	Months
Design control	Within SharePoint’s layouts	Within the product’s templates	Complete
Unlicensed staff	Not supported	Not supported	Supported
Roster, pay and HR data	Links, or Power Apps and connectors	Depends on product integrations	Built into the portal
Documents and policies	Excellent	Excellent	Usually kept in SharePoint and surfaced
Who maintains it	Your IT team	Vendor plus your IT team	Your team or a development partner

Packaged products vary a lot in price and quality, so compare them on the parts that matter to you: frontline mobile experience, content governance, analytics and how they handle Microsoft’s own changes.

A custom portal is a different kind of project. It is software with users, releases and support, so budget for it like any business app: a build, Australian hosting, and an ongoing care arrangement for updates and security patches. The trade is that you design exactly what each worker sees, choose how they sign in, and avoid per user platform fees for staff who only need a handful of screens. Many employers combine the two: SharePoint stays the home for policies and documents, and a small custom portal handles the personal, every shift information. If you’re comparing quotes for either path, our guide to software developer rates in Australia explains what drives the differences.

Search, permissions and AI answers over intranet content

Copilot and other AI assistants make intranet permissions a much bigger deal than they used to be. Microsoft states that Copilot only surfaces organisational data a user has at least view permission for, and uses the same access controls as the rest of Microsoft 365. That’s the right design, but it means content shared with everyone years ago, such as a salary spreadsheet in an old team site, can now turn up in an answer.

Before switching on Copilot, review which sites are shared with the whole organisation, remove stale access, and label sensitive libraries. Our comparison of Copilot and a custom AI assistant covers when a purpose built assistant over a curated set of documents gives better, safer answers, for example a policy assistant for frontline staff that only reads approved procedures. That’s the kind of system we build as a RAG knowledge base.

Bringing rosters, payroll and HR into the portal

A staff portal earns daily use when it shows each person their own information: shifts, leave balances, payslips, training due and the policies that apply to their role. That data lives in rostering, payroll, HR and learning systems, not SharePoint.

In SharePoint, you can link out to each system or surface data through Power Apps and connectors, which works when each system has a connector and staff have the licences. A custom portal connects to each system’s API directly, shows one view per worker, and can sign people in with the method that suits them, including single sign on with Entra ID for office staff and a mobile code for casuals.

If pay rules are part of the problem, see our guide to award interpretation software.

Where the portal stores personal information about staff, think about hosting location. Microsoft 365 and Power Platform environments are tied to a region, and a custom portal can be hosted in an Australian cloud region of your choice. If any provider is offshore, APP 8 of the Privacy Act requires reasonable steps to make sure the overseas recipient handles personal information properly. Get advice on how the Privacy Act applies to your staff data.

Why intranets fail, whichever platform you choose

Most intranets fail on ownership and content, not technology. The usual pattern:

1. Nobody owns it after launch. The project team disbands, news stops, and staff stop visiting.
2. It mirrors the org chart, so people have to know which department owns a document to find it.
3. Migration moves everything, including thousands of outdated files that bury the useful ones.
4. Frontline staff are an afterthought, with a desktop design that’s painful on a phone.
5. There’s no reason to return daily. Without personal information, such as rosters or tasks, the intranet becomes a place people visit only when told to.

A useful test before choosing: list the five things a frontline worker and an office worker each need most often. If most of them are documents and news, SharePoint will serve you well. If most of them are personal data from other systems, you are building an app, and should plan for one.

How AWLabs approaches intranet and portal projects

We often recommend plain SharePoint, configured well, and say so. When a custom staff portal makes more sense, we start with a 15 minute Development Consult, then a paid Discovery Audit covering your systems, workforce and licences, with the fee credited in full against the build. You then get a fixed price Schedule of Work with three options: The Minimum, The Recommended and The Complete. Senior engineers lead every build. See enterprise software development.